Imagine making all the incredible effort to get a spacecraft to another star system, only to crash it into a wild and unexplored world. That’s the gist of Stranded: Alien Dawn, a futuristic survival sim from the devs behind Surviving Mars that launches into early access today. The game puts you in charge of four survivors who’ll be up against the basic demands of continuing to exist, and facing dangerous alien creatures.
]]>Stranded: Alien Dawn is a new sci-fi survival sim coming from the developers of Surviving Mars, Haemimont Games, announced at today’s Gamescom Opening Night Live event. It’s set on a planet that’s a teensy bit greener than the red one near us, and heads into early access on Steam in October. Tap your instruments before checking out the sort-of-but-not-really live action reveal trailer below.
]]>This is a PSA to all you fans of city-building sims: Surviving Mars is free to keep on Steam right now, and you have until the end of the day to grab it. To be fair, Surviving Mars is less a "city" builder and more a colony builder, where it's your job to set up a home on the little red planet for humans to populate. It's a good time too, we reckon it's one of the best management games and best building games on PC, so you might as well take this opportunity to add it to your library.
]]>After 17 months without a notable patch or new content, Surviving Mars today got back to work with a free update expanding the colony-building sim's tourism systems. As they announced over the weekend, publishers Paradox Interactive have handed Haemimont's game over to another studio to resume development. A new full-on expansion is due later this year, but they started the return small today with the Tourism Update and a wee paid DLC. You can send tourists on sightseeing spacecar tours, for one.
]]>Surviving Mars is currently free on the Epic store. Now might be a good time to climb aboard a rocket to Mars, too: during this evening's Paradox Insider stream, the strategy publisher announced that development had resumed on new content for the game with a new development studio at the helm.
That new work begins to release this Monday with a free Tourism update and In-Dome Buildings DLC.
]]>Paradox Insider takes place tonight and will broadcast live on Twitch at 11am PT/7pm GMT/8pm CET. This is where Paradox Interactive reveal new information about games and updates they're planning on releasing in 2021. Will there be new information on Bloodlines 2? I doubt it, but you can watch the stream below to find out.
]]>You could live the life of a squillionaire by banging on about NFTs and posting bad memes, but you might find it less loathsome to quietly try establishing your own Martian colony with a free copy of Surviving Mars from the Epic Games Store. The colony-building management game was free on Epic way back in 2019 but if you missed it then, hey, here it is again. It's still a good game, and free is still a good price.
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>Paradox Interactive are pitching in on Covid-19 coronavirus relief efforts with a sale on several of their big management games and RPGs until Friday, April 3rd. You can snag some mighty hefty discounts on things like Cities: Skylines, Pillars Of Eternity, and BattleTech. Paradox are committing proceeds from the sale to the World Health Organization's Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
]]>After the blurry blue delights of last month's Sonic fest, those bundle fiends over at Humble have put together a brand new pack of game goodies for December, this time focusing on Paradox's best management games to celebrate the early access launch of Surviving the Aftermath. Ironically, Surviving the Aftermath did not, in fact, survive the cut to get into the bundle itself, but Humble's Paradox management bundle does include the most excellent Surviving Mars, Cities: Skylines and Prison Architect and all their various expansions for under $20.
]]>The latest game giveaway on the Epic Games Store is Surviving Mars, 2018's city-builder about raising Martian colonies from dust. Yes, absolutely this process involves a large number of potatoes. The Space Race expansion is free too, as is the wee musical Marsvision Song Contest DLC (sadly just more soundtrack songs, not an actual contest - I wish!). You've got one week to get onboard before the freebies blast off without you.
Living on Mars? Easy. Even that meme idiot might be able to do it. But living on Earth? That's a challenge. Especially if you're not one of the self-important squillionaires planning to piss off to another planet (or Middle-Earth) once we fully ruin Earth. So after offering the easy future in colony-building management sim Surviving Mars, Paradox today announced Surviving The Aftermath. They describe it as a "post-apocalyptic survival colony builder" and... that's about all they have to say right now. That future, eh?
]]>I’m trapped on Mars, and it’s getting cold. Despite the reflective sheeting I’ve hung up to insulate my workspace, night has long since fallen, and the heat is leaching from the glass walls. I’m eating boiled potatoes yet again, and I miss my family like crazy. But there’s no way I can see them again, until I’ve solved a lot of problems
So I put another layer on, rub my hands to warm them, and press on with the mission. Leaning forward to inspect my screen again, my face is lit with the dull red glow of the monitor - the same sombre ochre as the Martian surface. My face looks haggard in that light, as I review the colony’s dwindling water stocks. I’ll have to set a new vaporator, and that’ll mean making new parts, which I’ll need metals and… yeah, it’s going to be a long night yet.
]]>Green is the new red and you, dear Surviving Mars player, have committed the fashion faux-pas of colonising a planet in last season's colour. Oh dear oh dear. Thankfully, the second expansion for Haemimont's colony-building strategy game will allow you to change that passé rust red for verdant greens and pops of blues by terraforming the planet. As a bonus, terraforming should make the planet safe for humans without clunky spacesuits, which should vastly expand the planet's fashion possibilities. Terraforming Mars will also bring economic benefits and... but I assume it's mostly for fashion.
]]>The publishers of click-o-strategy games from Crusader Kings II to Cities: Skylines are bringing our precious PC mods to console, teaming up with Microsoft to launch cross-platform modding support. Paradox Interactive are starting with Surviving Mars, 2018's pretty deece space colony game, and plan to bring mods to more of their Xbone versions later this year. While this change mostly benefits Xboners, isn't it nice that they'll get to join in all the fun we have on PC? Surviving Mars is even adding mouse and keyboard support on Xbone. Aw, bless, he thinks he's a PC.
]]>After launching small DLC without the game exploding on the pad, Surviving Mars developers Haemimont Games are just about ready for their colony-management sim's first expansion. Space Race is its name and, publishers Paradox confirmed today, launching on November 15th is its aim. The expansion will introduce rival colonies competing with you for the contracts, support, and parent-like approval of sponsors (including two new sponsors, Brazil and Japan), leading to new challenges, new vehicles, new buildings, new skulduggery, and new events including... problems with a Flat Mars Society? Oh sure, let them build a spaceship to go up and prove Mars is flat, that will work out fine.
]]>My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn’t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there’s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that serve as a brilliant panacea for stress.
]]>Surviving Mars's initial foray into off-world colonisation is bearing fruit, as developers Haemimont have announced Space Race, its first expansion grown on Martian soil. While the original game was purely a story of mankind struggling against a hostile environment, the Space Race expansion sounds a little more realistic - this time you've got AI-controlled corporate and national rivals. While you won't be declaring war on anyone, you're still in competition, and there's always the option to headhunt talent from rival colonies. Below, the reveal trailer.
]]>As well-liked as Surviving Mars is for its uncompromising look at offworld resource management (you can't order some next-day delivery oxygen if you're running low), it's not unreasonable to wish that there was an option to have it ease up a little. Now players can get a feel for its many spinning plates without your doom feeling quite so inevitable. The Da Vinci update, released yesterday, introduces Creative Mode to the game, letting you pick and choose which of the game's more challenging elements you'd like to trim back before you play.
]]>We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second.
And what games they are! 2018 has been a great year so far, and our top picks run the whole range, from hand drawn oddities made by one person, to big mega-studio blockbusters that took the work of hundreds. And each of them is special to us in some way. Just like you are too. Click through the arrows to see the full spread of our faves so far. Better luck next year to the games that didn't make the cut this time.
]]>That big shop on the internet, Amazon, has been selling pirated copies of PC games, some do-gooders have discovered (or rather, sellers using Amazon as a storefront have been selling the pirate goods). The dodgy games include icy societal survival game Frostpunk and dusty martian city-builder Surviving Mars, which were being sold for the suspiciously cheapo prices of $3 and $4. If you bought one of these games, you got an illegitimate installer to download, which contained some files ripped from GOG store versions of the games. Oh no.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>We've diligently posted about DLC and similar gubbins for Surviving Mars, Haemimont and Paradox's good-ish space colony management game, over the past few months, but one thing we've not done is dip a finger into its red soil to check whether or not it's ready for new life to grow. Along with the DLC - most of it free - there've been a few major patches, which include trying to streamline the finickity interface, add more variety to the otherwise one-note geodesic domes and generally save us from falling into a black hole of needless micro-management. This month's 'Mysteries Supply Pack' free DLC having caught my eye, I though I'd quickly establish the grass roots of a new colony to see how it's all doing.
"Quickly." Hah.
]]>You can go a whole game of Surviving Mars without triggering one of its 'Mysteries', though that's as much to do with a slightly dodgy interface as it is personal choice. But when you do the flip the switch and welcome uncertainty into your citizens' delicate lives, everything gets upended. I won't soon forget the legion of floating orbs that sucked all the heat out of my colony, killing hundreds. They're one giant leap into the fantastical from a game that is otherwise fairly sedate about its sci-fi, but I dig the option to wilfully remix things once your base-building turns staid - it reminds me of triggering a disaster in SimCity 2000, just to sadistically mix things up.
So I'm glad to hear that the latest round of free DLC for Haemimont's mostly great red planet management sim introduces three more 'Mysteries' with which to optionally traumatise your off-world colonists. As well as meaning you won't just run into the same few scenarios in a new playthrough, they give you new things to deal with in your current one.
]]>Red planet colonisation sim Surviving Mars did a mostly stand-up job of transplanting Sim City tropes to a hostile new world, but a slightly iffy interface and an inflexible aesthetic perhaps meant that its high-stakes potato-farming wasn't always as epic as hoped. As is increasingly tradition for Paradox-published games - hey-o, Stellaris and Cities: Skylines - it seems long-term refinement is very much plan. We've had two major updates since its March launch, adding features and tweaking annoyances, and this week sees the third, 'Curiosity.'
This performs some pretty signficant user interface-reworking, but clearly the first thing we'll all be cooing at is the different dome designs it's adding to the hitherto 'any shape you want, so long as it's an upside-down pudding bowl' options. In other words, Surviving Mars is now even better suited to taking screenshots that look like prog-rock LP covers.
]]>There are too many idiots on Mars but that's about to change. Colony-building sim Surviving Mars, which pleased our Alec well enough when it launched last month, has received its first major patch. The update notes are a treat - not quite Crusader Kings, The Sims or Dwarf Fortress quality, but there's some solid stuff in there.
"Colonists will no longer try to walk kilometers on foot to resettle resulting in them dying from lack of oxygen". Like the headline says: fewer idiots.
]]>John is elsewhere this week, squeezed into Brendan's luggage for a flight to San Francisco and the Game Developers Conference, so I'm here for the regular rundown of last week's top-selling games on Steam. This week, the letters R, A, and S are well-represented with strong showings from both Mars and rats.
]]>I shed a surprising amount of tears during the founding of my first red planet colony in Surviving Mars. None of those tears had anything to do with the pipe leak that killed 58 people, I hasten to add. For those, I just swore at my repair drones and made more colonists work gruelling night-shifts at the polymer factory so we could patch up the air tubes.
My tears, I'm afraid, came instead at testaments to my own magnificence: when a dusty patch of sand patrolled by listless worker robots and automated factories saw the construction of its first bio-dome, when the first humans from Earth arrived to stake out a new life in this place I had built for them, when the first non-Earth baby was born. Live inside my work, ye Martians, and try not get caught inside a meteor storm.
]]>The cubes are black, and shiny, and mobile. They hover in a neat, impossible stack outside one of my colony's larger domes, clicking delicately about one another, always returning to the same overall shape, harming nobody. My robot rovers form a cautious circle around them while my scientists scratch their heads and bicker. I look at the cubes, one of the many Mysteries of Haemimont's deceptively by-the-numbers management sim Surviving Mars, and the cubes, somehow, look right back at me.
My colonists are also looking at the cubes, noses pressed against their reinforced dome walls. The cubes are giving my colonists some funny ideas. One group considers them a threat, and wants me to blast them to bits with high-energy ions. Others hail them as gifts from some alien god, and want them brought inside the domes where they can be worshipped. A third, undecided faction argues that the cubes should be stored for further study. Everybody is at each other's throats, and everybody is looking to me for a decision.
]]>As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework that exploded in the many midnights of New Year's celebrations was stuffed with games and they were still raining down across the world this morning. We cannot stop them, we cannot contain them, but we can attempt to understand them.
Hundreds of them will be worth our time and attention, but we've selected a few of the ones that excite us most as we prepare for another year of splendid PC gaming. There's something for everyone, from Aunt Maude, the military genius, to merry Ian Rogue, the man who hates permadeath and procedural generation with a passion.
]]>The people living in my new habitat dome have jobs to do, that's what brought them to Mars in the first place, but when they finish work they have two choices: they can either go to the casino or the bar. I could have built a gym or some other kind of leisure facility, but I went with the casino and bar combo. It's what I'd want if I had to live in a dome on a hostile planet.
And make no mistake, Mars is a hostile planet. That's why Surviving Mars [official site] can be so demanding.
]]>Surviving Mars [official site] looks like it's shaping up nicely, if you ask me. Made by Tropico 3 developers Haemimont, it's a base-building game set on the Red Planet in which you hunt for resources to power settlements housed in giant glass domes.
Judging by the new trailer, featuring the first in-game footage, it's one to keep an eye on: there's the snappy animations of games like Cities: Skyline (which shares a publisher – Paradox Interactive) when you place a structure down, be that a twirling generator or a solar panel. And those domes are full of colour and provide a real contrast to the red around them. But, as the trailer suggests, it's not simply an idyllic space holiday because there will be disasters like meteor strikes to try and get through.
]]>During the opening hours, you won't see a single person in Surviving Mars [official site]. It's a bold choice, having impersonal robots out there laying the groundwork of a colony, but the benefits are immediately obvious when watching the game in action. There's a certain Factorium-like mechanical satisfaction to the flow of metal, creating supply chains that stud the surface with structures. The great advantage is the gradual shift from a red planet to a green planet though, even if those bubbles of green are few and far between.
More than any other city builder I can think of, Surviving Mars has the potential to show the life of a settlement, and it does that by beginning in a dead place.
]]>In a new partnership with Tropico developers Haemimont Games, Paradox have announced a Matt Damon simulator / colonial-management-city-builder Surviving Mars [official site]. It's a "hardcore management game" about the colonisation of Mars and if the short trailer is anything to go by, it'll be leaning toward the EVERYTHING GOES WRONG end of the management spectrum. One for Brendan, then, who does like to put poor little colonists through the wringer.
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